Book Description

Excerpt from Early Western Travels, 1748-1846, Vol. 10: A Series of Annotated Reprints of Some of the Best and Rarest Contemporary Volumes of Travel, Descriptive of the Alborigines and Social and Economic Conditions in the Middle and Far West, During the Period of Early American Settlement During the second decade of the nineteenth century, a colony of English emigrants was established in south-eastern Illinois, at a place in Edwards County known afterwards as English Prairie. Interesting in itself as being a typical experiment in transplantation and in assimilation to frontier conditions, this settlement has attracted unusual attention because of the war of pamphlets it evoked, and the political prominence of some of its detractors. Agricultural emigration was, at that period, a subject of much importance in Great Britain, and the English Prairie settlement became the nucleus around which the contention was waged. At the close of the Napoleonic wars, England's rural interests were much depressed. Hopes had been entertained that, with the return of peace, conditions for the farmer would improve, but these expectations proved fallacious, prices continually lowered, rents and wages increased, distress was widespread, and agrarian discontent alarming. Added to this, the political situation was grave. The domination of the Tory party, the reactionary tendency of foreign affairs, and the general national impoverishment led to the growth of a strong Radical party, which demanded manhood suffrage, abolition of the Corn Laws, and abrogation of the time-honored privileges of the upper classes. Mobs and disturbances were frequent, and there was developed a strong sentiment in favor of emigration to the United States, where political freedom, combined with the prospects of cheap lands, offered an enticing prospect to the harassed rural population of England. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.